I'm heading up the Planetary Bill of Rights Project at http://www.PlanetaryBillOfRights.org/

The site needs to be redesigned with something that's easily editable by a novice
user like myself, who's just into the philosophy and needs to focus on that and not web design.

It also needs CSS included transparently ( which I understand VSD still cant do? ) and to be W3C compliant, which the site is not yet, and I understand the latest VSD CAN now do but not on an older design like this?

So I'm not sure if VSD is the best approach to this, or if we need to find a philosophical Objectivist web designer volunteer who can work in some other software and suggest a better way to go about this.

Are you thinking of creating the redesign and the pages, or will you just be the one editing the text, pictures and such?

I'm not a VSD user, and your specifications I would think, would be a bit too much for VSD (maybe someone else can prove me wrong?)

If I were to create such a project, I would use the html Editor (code mode), and afterwards turn the whole thing into a CMS to enable editing online.

Melissa-
This looks like a simple enough site to do on Visual Site Designer. You would need to copy/paste those neat earth buttons to the new site, but again there does not appear to be anything too complicated on the site that VSD can't handle. Since VSD is a WYSIWYG program, designing is a breeze. With the great support here from both users and CC advisors there should be no problems.
or- I'm sure a nice web design company will only charge you a few thousand to do the job otherwise!